President Donald Trump's legal team made several grave errors in their new $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch, according to an attorney who specializes in First Amendment law.
In a thread posted to his X account Friday, Atlanta, Georgia-based lawyer Andrew Fleischman predicted that Trump's lawsuit will be promptly thrown out due to multiple glaring issues. Chiefly, Trump filed the lawsuit in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. While he may have done so as a means of drawing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — the Trump appointee who officially scuttled former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith's classified documents case against Trump last July — Fleischman pointed out that Florida has an anti-SLAPP statute [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation] that will doom Trump's litigation.
Florida's libel and defamation laws also require that plaintiffs give defendants at least five days' notice that they plan to sue them before officially submitting the filing in court. According to Fleischman, Trump "made that impossible" by suing the Journal just a day after the paper published its bombshell report about a lewd birthday message Trump allegedly sent Epstein in 2003.
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"The remedy is dismissal," Fleischman tweeted. "And I suspect that means Trump pays the WSJ's legal fees."
"That's not the only big problem with the lawsuit," he continued in a subsequent tweet. "But it's the one that an 11 year old with a Lexis subscription could figure out in 5 minutes."
Fleischman cited a lawsuit filed in Florida last year in which a plaintiff failed to abide by the required five-day notification rule, which resulted in the judge promptly dismissing the suit. In the Faller v. Beasley Broadcasting Group., Inc case, U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell of the Middle District of Florida repeatedly referenced the five-day rule in her decision to dismiss plaintiff James Stuart Faller's defamation case.
"The rule does seem very clear," Fleischman wrote.
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The Georgia-based attorney went on to opine that Trump should be aware of that rule already, since he abided by it in his unsuccessful 2023 lawsuit against CNN (which Fleischman noted was still "dismissed as frivolous"). He further observed that the Journal covered its tracks by acknowledging that it remains unknown how the note to Epstein was prepared.
Fleischman also said that Trump's legal team is unable to prove "actual malice" in the Journal's reporting, which is a requirement for any defamation lawsuit. In order to win a defamation claim, Trump would have to convince the court that the Journal knew the information it was publishing about him was false.
"This lawsuit is meant to punish a newspaper for fair reporting," he tweeted. "Any lawyer who tells you it has merit is talking out his a--."
Click here to read Fleischman's thread in full.
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